Tootfinder

Around the turn of this century, a composer named Camille Saint-Saens wrote
a satirical zoological-fantasy called "Le Carnaval des Animaux." Aside from
one movement of this piece, "The Swan", Saint-Saens didn't allow this work
to be published or even performed until a year had elapsed after his death.
(He died in 1921.)
Most of us know the "Swan" movement rather well, with its smooth,
flowing cello melody against a calm backgr…

In Ursula K. Le Guin's "A Man of the People" (part of "Four Ways to Forgiveness") there's a scene where the Hainish protagonist begins studying history. It's excellent in many respects, but what stood out the most to me was the softly incomprehensible idea of a people with multiple millions of years of recorded history. As one's mind starts to try to trace out the implications of that, it dawns on you that you can't actually comprehend the concept. Like, you read the sentence & understood all the words, and at first you were able to assemble them into what seemed like a conceptual understanding, but as you started to try to fill out that understating, it began to slip away, until you realized you didn't in fact have the mental capacity to build a full understanding and would have you paper things over with a shallow placeholder instead.
I absolutely love that feeling, as one of the ways in which reading science fiction can stretch the brain, and I connected it to a similar moment in Tsutomu Nihei's BLAME, where the android protagonists need to ride an elevator through the civilization/galaxy-spanning megastructure, and turn themselves off for *millions of years* to wait out the ride.
I'm not sure why exactly these scenes feel more beautifully incomprehensible than your run-of-the-mill "then they traveled at lightspeed for a millennia, leaving all their family behind" scene, other than perhaps the authors approach them without trying to use much metaphor to make them more comprehensible (or they use metaphor to emphasize their incomprehensibility).
Do you have a favorite mind=expanded scene of this nature?
#AmReading

"The most worrying possibility behind Earth’s [accelerating warming] is how the general nature of clouds may be changing in response to climbing temperatures. It’s a feedback loop that could potentially exacerbate warming and is one of the single biggest uncertainties in predicting future climate."

Global Warming Is Speeding Up and the World Is Feeling the Effects
Human-caused global warming has been increasing faster and faster since the 1970s.

Entropic additive energy and entropy inequalities for sums and products
Rupert Li, Lampros Gavalakis, Ioannis Kontoyiannis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20813

Entropic additive energy and entropy inequalities for sums and products
Following a growing number of studies that, over the past 15 years, have established entropy inequalities via ideas and tools from additive combinatorics, in this work we obtain a number of new bounds for the differential entropy of sums, products, and sum-product combinations of continuous random variables. Partly motivated by recent work by Goh on the discrete entropic version of the notion of "additive energy", we introduce the additive energy of pairs of continuous random variables and prov…

Die letzte Nachricht im WhatsApp-Chat der Freundinnen bezüglich der Open-Air-Aufführung des Films "Malaria" vorgestern war von F., "Ich hab 3 Tickets und 3 Regenponchos". Gestern postet sie das Foto einer gehäuselosen Schnecke, lebt also noch.

Both Harvard and Columbia are failing to articulate the need and meaning of education, besides economic value. There is no sense of humanity or the humanities or the search for a truths. Both schools are for-profit companies in the minds of their boards, and their presidents reflect that understanding.
From: @…

Wikipedia right now
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedding_of_Jeff_Bezos_and_Lauren_Sánchez

Ferroelectricity in 6 Angstrom-Thick Two-dimensional Ga$_2$O$_3$
Tong Jiang (School of Materials Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, Key Laboratory of 3D Micro/Nano Fabrication and Characterization of Zhejiang Province, School of Engineering, Westlake University, Hangzhou, China, School of Engineering, Westlake University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China), Han Chen (School of Materials Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, Key Laboratory of…

Ferroelectricity in 6 Angstrom-Thick Two-dimensional Ga$_2$O$_3$
Atomic-scale ferroelectric thin films hold great promise for high-density, low-power applications but face stability and voltage scaling challenges at extreme thinness. Here, we demonstrate ferroelectricity in single-crystalline two-dimensional (2D) Ga$_2$O$_3$, an ultra-wide-bandgap semiconductor, at just 6 angstrom thickness, exhibiting exceptional retention and thermal stability. We show that epitaxial beta-Ga$_2$O$_3$ can be exfoliated down to a half-unit cell thickness via a self-limiting …

Epitaxial Stabilization and Emergent Charge Order in Copper Selenide Thin Films
B. M. Sharif (Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA and Materials Science and Engineering Program, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA), B. Theunissen (Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA and Materials Science and Engineering Program, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA), C. We…

Epitaxial Stabilization and Emergent Charge Order in Copper Selenide Thin Films
We demonstrate epitaxial growth of copper selenide (Cu$_{2-x}$Se) thin films in both cubic and rhombohedral phases, achieved via molecular beam epitaxy on Al$_2$O$_3$ (001) substrates. Remarkably, the high-temperature cubic phase -- which in bulk transforms into the rhombohedral structure below 400 K -- is stabilized at room temperature and below, well outside its bulk equilibrium stability range. In the cubic phase films, temperature-dependent electrical transport reveals a pronounced, hystere…